Thursday, January 21, 2010

Massachusetts' Self-Inflicted Humiliation

Today critics who come from many different directions but who are united in their anti-Obama agenda are having a great time chortling over the just concluded election in Massachusetts, in which the voters chose to hand the seat that had been honorably held for many years by the recently deceased E Kennedy over to a previously unknown Republican lockstepper named Scott Brown.

From the way that this campaign was always mentioned, you would think that the race was not between two individuals named Brown and Martha Coakley but instead was a contest between the entire right-wing conservative mass .in the U.S. political world and one man, the current President of the U.S., B. Obama (who-- and not ever incidentally -- we are never allowed to forget is the first so-called "black" President, while his predecessor, the truly deplorable G.W. Bush, was never cited as being the 43rd so-called "white" President through all his eight years of playing in that post) . And so this loss is being widely portrayed as a stunning personal defeat for Obama, though he doesn't live or hang out anywhere near the Bay State, and the word most often being joyfully used for what his detractors see as having been nevertheless inflicted on him there is "humiliation."

However, from here it is not at all President Obama who needs to struggle out from under that precisely longitudinal mound of humiliation that is so like a heavy snow that has slid off a steeply pitched metal roof in the first warm day after the storm. Nor is it Martha Coakley or the Democrats. Instead it is the once "great state" of Massachusetts that now lies all but buried under that self-inflicted pile of ... shame, because it harbors so many people who have turned on a very slippery dime and suddenly turned their backs on Senator Kennedy and on the normally progressive Massachusetts way of things, as well as on the well-being of the American people in general. Instead those voters chose to side with the constant and implacable enemy of all that is decent and good, the side represented by the Republicans, in this instance, in that side's total determination to deny affordable health care to all. Because, if he had managed to live and stay lucid just a little longer, Kennedy would undoubtedly have urged the passage of this bill, regardless of any deficiencies it might have. He would have have seen it as being at least a start toward real improvement in the American health care system, and that might have one day brought it closer to the systems of more forward-thinking nations, like Canada and a number of countries in Europe ...and that might yet accomplish that regardless, unless the country is indeed totally sold on the noxious taste of the conservative snake oil used in this and all U.S. elections.